Many young Afghans suffering mental illness with nonstop war

These mental illnesses can lead to violent acts, especially towards U.S. soldiers. | AP Photo

“We talk with them about this idea of partnership and collaboration,” Goepner said. But Afghans refuse. Americans propose a joint project for a new school or well, as examples, but the Afghans routinely respond by saying: “That’s impossible,” Goepner said. They’re afraid.

He recalled a conversation with one village chief, who said: “You guys came out, and you built us a well. The next day after you left, the Taliban came back and destroyed the well and said, ‘This is your punishment for collaborating with the government.’ Please don’t come back here.”

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That, Goepner and others said, is the prevailing view in most every Afghan village or town they visited. If Afghan government or military officials try to meet with a village’s elders, most of them refuse to show up — afraid the Taliban will see them at the meeting. Those few who do participate, he added, “were routinely critical of the government” or Western forces “or both.” These people’s mental conditions often leave them with the view that the Taliban hold superhuman capabilities, several studies noted.

“Both the population and the government suffer from such high rates of mental disorders that accomplishing positive objectives becomes extremely difficult,” Goepner explained. “Increasing government capability and legitimacy and gaining the population’s active support are quite problematic when the government, security forces and population are beset with PTSD and depression.”

Michael O’Hanlon, director of research for the foreign policy program at The Brookings Institution, seemed to concur when he said, “Very few people in the world are beaten down, battered and bruised as much as they are.”

Jones agreed, saying: “The years of war ripped apart not just the physical infrastructure. The psychological structure of Afghan society has been devastated, too.”

Or as AnnaMaria Cardinalli, a social scientist who worked for the military in Afghanistan for several months, put it in her new book, “Crossing the Wire,” average Afghans greet visitors with “a vacant and unsettled stare in the eyes.”

She was the lead researcher on a Pentagon study of pedophilia in Afghanistan. Over generations, older men have taken tens of thousands of little boys as lovers, an Afghan custom, often leaving the boys with severe emotional, and perhaps even physical wounds. The children remain untreated because mental health care is virtually nonexistent, and parents are generally ashamed to seek treatment for physical wounds.

All of that adds to the toxic mix of dysfunction. One important result: Most Afghan civilians want nothing at all to do with the Afghan government or the Western military forces supporting it — even though their support “is the critical element” of counterinsurgency strategy Goepner said.

But Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, who led the Western coalition’s military headquarters in Kabul, seemed wholly unaware of these problems when he stated the mission’s key objective a few years ago: persuading Afghan civilians to join government service.

At that time, in 2010, two-thirds of the municipal government jobs in Kandahar remained unfilled because no Afghans were willing to take them — even with staggeringly high unemployment.

“It’s never going to be a perfect security situation before they fill those jobs,” Rodriguez said back then. “How that occurs over time will really be the measuring stick of how we’re really accomplishing this mission of building stability.” Since then, foreign workers from Pakistan and elsewhere have filled most of those vacant jobs.

Pillar was somewhat dismissive of the psychological studies, saying they “kind of over-determine the problem. It’s not new information to know that Afghans have been under an awful lot of stress and have been subjected to a lot of things that are pretty damn grim and painful and stressful and damaging. But to put it bluntly, I don’t think we need a shrink to tell us that.”

Still, trying to raise awareness, Goepner wrote two journal pieces — one for an internal military journal, the Military Review. It noted that training for American forces “does not explain the inaction of the population or the sense of hopelessness that is present,” adding: “To succeed in counterinsurgency, the miliary must become masters of the decisive terrain — the human terrain.”

In the interview, he said enlisting local support “is the critical element” for successful counterinsurgency strategy — known in the military as COIN. And as O’Hanlon sees it, “Much of the original concept of COIN is falling short.”

Nonetheless, Goepner said almost no one in the military seems to have paid attention to his articles, both published last year. The papers “were written for no other reason but to say: ‘Hey American decision makers, if we are trying to win, this is a factor I think we should consider.’”

But “other than my peers, I haven’t heard a thing.”

Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for The New York Times.